How to Cook a Wolf

Editor’s Pick

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Italian

It’s Ethan Stowell's lowest-ticket restaurant yet: a tiny neighborhood pocket on the top of Queen Anne whose barrel-vaulted ceiling and coppery light imparts a sense of a glowing hearth. The name honors M. F. K. Fisher's 1942 paean to eating simply; a fitting benediction for a restaurant that celebrates small plates and uncomplicated pastas shimmering with earthy precision. Thick slices of blush-perfect duck fanned across a plate with beets and mandarin oranges is about as wacky as Wolf's kitchen gets; the rule is more like a plate of orecchiette pasta with cauliflower, screaming with garlic and anchovies; or rolls of trofie pasta, intensely brightened with parsley-walnut pesto.